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Published for the first time in English, Panorama is a superb rediscovered novel of the Holocaust by a neglected modern master. One of a handful of death camp survivors to fictionalize his experiences in German, H. G. Adler is an essential author—referenced by W. G. Sebald in his classic novel Austerlitz, and a direct literary descendant of Kafka.

When The Journey was discovered in a Harvard bookshop and translated by Peter Filkins, it began a major reassessment of the Prague-born H. G. Adler by literary critics and historians alike. Known for his monumental Theresienstadt 1941–1945, a day-by-day account of his experiences in the Nazi slave-labor community before he was sent to Auschwitz, Adler also wrote six novels. The very depiction of the Holocaust in fiction caused furious debate and delays in their publication. Now Panorama, his first novel, written in 1948, is finally available to convey the kinds of truths that only fiction can.

A brilliant epic, Panorama is a portrait of a place and people soon to be destroyed, as seen through the eyes of young Josef Kramer. Told in ten distinct scenes, it begins in pastoral Word War I–era Bohemia, where the boy passively witnesses the “wonders of the world” in a thrilling panorama display; follows him to a German boarding school full of creeping xenophobia and prejudice; and finds him in young adulthood sent to a labor camp and then to one of the infamous extermination camps, before he chooses exile abroad after the war. Josef’s philosophical journey mirrors the author’s own: from a stoic acceptance of events to a realization that “the viewer is also the participant” and that action must be taken in life, if only to make sure the dead are not forgotten.

Achieving a stream-of-consciousness power reminiscent of James Joyce and Gertrude Stein, H. G. Adler is a modern artist with unique historical importance. Panorama is lasting evidence of both the torment of his life and the triumph of his gifts.

4 Stars and Up Feature: Kitchens of the Great Midwest
"Foodies and those who love contemporary literature will devour this novel that is being compared to Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge. A standout." --Library JournalLearn more

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The first English-language translation of an opus by Adler (The Journey), Czech writer and Holocaust survivor, opens with the young Josef Kramer, at a "panorama," a rotating display of pictures of exotic places. The novel's structure imitates that of the panorama, each a snapshot of an epoch in Josef's life, from a neurotic childhood to a year in the countryside, then a period in a hellish boarding school. The most biting and amusing sections are Josef as a tutor in a wealthy and dysfunctional family and working at a frenetic "cultural center." Each episode ends with Josef drifting to sleep, trying to create internal order from chaos. War comes and two sections deal with Josef as a forced laborer and his time in concentration camps and his reflecting on his life from self-imposed exile in Britain. Adler's writing is stream-of-consciousness, heavily philosophical, and the style changes as Josef matures. Adler's portrayal of daily life and a young man's existential maturation in the region of Bohemia between the wars is full of satirical and loving detail that turns grim in the Holocaust sections. But the long, clause-heavy sentences feel clunky in translation and make this book more fascinating as a treasure of cultural and literary history than as a purely narrative read. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

A Czech Jew who wrote largely in German and survived both Theresienstadt and Auschwitz, Adler is the author of a number of contemplative and variously challenging works of Holocaust witness, including The Journey (1962), which was recently translated into English for the first time. With this novel saturated with autobiography (the author’s phrase), Adler chronicles various moments in the life of protagonist Josef: unhappy childhood in Prague, brutish boarding school, teenage adventures in the bucolic Czech forest, political and bureaucratic frustrations as a young academic, and, finally, hardship and bleakness in a concentration camp. It is written in a captivating stream-of-consciousness style that wanders yet comes to circle certain salient observations, and readers may note stylistic and philosophical continuities between this and the work of W. G. Sebald, who claimed Adler as a major influence. But, in part, the beauty of this work is that it can’t be easily categorized: it’s not quite a bildungsroman; it’s delightfully if erratically satirical; it’s hauntingly bleak yet possesses echoes of the transcendent. This is an important book by an author who deserves not to be forgotten. --Brendan Driscoll

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

Hans Adler, a noted Czech novelist and poet, wrote "Panorama" in 1947. It is a fictionalised account of his life from childhood up to his release from various German concentration camps. It was published in German in 1968, but not translated and published in English until 2010. It followed "The Journey", another book about the Holocaust, which was first published in German in 1962 but not translated to English until 2008. Both of Adler's books, "The Journey" and "Panorama" were translated from the German by Peter Filkins. Adler died in London in 1988.

"Panorama" is a large, epic-length book, divided not into chapters, per se, but rather into "stories". Each story is about the same character, Josef Kramer, who is born in Prague in 1910. The "stories" are written - and translated - in rather free-form style. The translator, in his notes, states that the text, as Adler wrote it and he translated it, "...long, streaming sentences build clause upon clause, in order to render the consciousness at work, narrating the novel as much as the events themselves." It's not the writing style that is the problem of "Panorama"; it is the "distance" from the material to the reader.

Each "story" is about Josef Kramer and follow him in age. However, the same secondary characters - always richly drawn - do not continue from story to story. It is almost as if Josef Kramer is "reborn" in every story; an orphan in terms of who he takes along with him. After the first story, which is beautifully written about his early years, his parents, relative, and friends seem to "disappear". The second story tells of his life for a year or so in a small Czech village, living on a farm. No characters continue from first to second story and its the same for the rest of the book.Read more ›

Panorama sweeps through a life begun in Prague during the First World War to a quiet hill in Cornwall after the Second. A child in a constricted family, a brutal boarding school, a scathing look at social climbers, crazy capers in a cultural bureaucracy, then a slow march towards the concentration camps. No film can paint these pictures of the camps as Adler's words do. Finally, contemplation in a quiet English town, far from the turmoil of Joseph's former existence. Joseph, not the Joseph K of Kafka, is often a passive actor but never disengaged. Panorama cracks the door open on mid 20th century German Jewish life with intensity and originality.